Oana Sanziana Marian

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  passages January 05, 2016

  Ionel Talpazan (1955–2015)

  IONEL TALPAZAN was almost sixty when he became an American citizen and changed his name to Adrian da Vinci. This optional self-creation while ceremonially assuming a new national identity has few parallels in the nonimmigrant experience, except in religious practices. To name is to order, to gather. To be named is to belong; the power rests with the namer. Talpazan had many names; born Ionel Pârvu in Romania, he assumed the name of one of his foster parents. At the end of his life—a life that included serial abandonment and physical abuse, state oppression, a March night swim across the Danube

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  print January 2015

  Becca Lowry

  “She was the Angelina Jolie of wolves.” So said one of Yellowstone’s biologists of the gray wolf they called the ’06 Female, to whom Becca Lowry dedicated RIP 06 (all works 2014), one of the six sculptural pieces exhibited in her first solo show. In a series of carvings, Lowry trenched and scored the work with an angle grinder, a skill saw, chisels, and, eventually, a rasp; inlaid it with steel; spray- and handpainted it; and, finally, scraped it with a razor. RIP 06’s most delicate element—a vertebraic column down its middle—serves as its center of gravity. Winglike panels extend from

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  slant April 2013

  performance art and politics in Romania

  OF THE VARIOUS TYPES OF NEGLECT, one is almost kind: letting something be, even freeing it by virtue of abandonment. Another form is aggressive, a traumatizing and annulling intervention on the part of a powerful entity imposing silence and erasure on a less powerful one. Neglect, first the one variety, then the other, forms the backdrop of contemporary Romanian art, and performance in particular.

  Following the 1989 revolution, eager to reframe more than reform its structures of power, the Romanian state assumed a mostly laissez-faire position in the administration of its culture. Through two